Three hundred members own the ovens, and they vote on the bread.

At half past four on a Thursday morning, the lights are already on behind the steamed-up windows of the Common Loaf on Weaver’s Row. Inside, two bakers are shaping the first batch of sourdough while a third feeds the wood-fired oven with offcuts from a joinery down the road. By seven, when the shop opens, there will be a queue of perhaps twenty people outside – and most of them will own a share of the place.

The Common Loaf is a cooperative bakery owned by 312 members, each of whom paid £100 for a share when it was founded four years ago. The members elect a committee, set the broad direction of the business at an annual meeting and, once a quarter, vote on which breads appear on the shelves.

How a bakery ends up with three hundred owners

The bakery began after the previous one on the same site closed. Its owner, who had run it for twenty-six years, retired and could not find a buyer. For a few months the street had no bakery at all, and a group of neighbours began meeting in the back room of the Fleece to discuss whether they could take it over themselves.

They raised £31,200 from the first round of shares, enough to buy the ovens and fittings and to pay six months’ rent. A local credit union lent a further £18,000. Membership is open to anyone who lives or works in the city, and the share price has not changed: £100 buys one share and one vote, regardless of how many shares a member holds.

“Nobody gets rich from this, and that was never the point. The point was that we wanted a bakery on our street and nobody was going to give us one,” said Fenella Okonjo, a primary school teacher who chaired the founding committee and still bakes on Saturday mornings as a volunteer.

Okonjo said that the cooperative structure had made it easier to survive the first difficult years. When energy prices rose sharply, the members voted to accept a 20p rise on the price of a loaf rather than cut the bakers’ hours. Several members also offered interest-free loans to help cover the bills through the winter.

Democracy in the proving drawer

The quarterly bread vote is, by most accounts, the members’ favourite part of being an owner. Head baker Tobias Grenville draws up a shortlist of six or seven loaves, and members choose four to join the core range for the next three months. The ballot is held both online and on paper slips dropped into a biscuit tin by the till.

The results have been occasionally surprising. A dense rye loaf with caraway, which Grenville added to the shortlist almost as a joke, won the autumn vote by a large margin and has stayed on the shelves ever since. A sweet potato and rosemary bread, which the bakers thought would be a hit, lasted only one quarter.

  • Permanent: white sourdough, seeded wholemeal, a plain tin loaf
  • Voted in this quarter: caraway rye, spelt and honey, a cheese and onion bloomer, a fruited tea loaf
  • Voted out: the rosemary sweet potato loaf, the walnut sourdough

Grenville, who trained in a hotel kitchen before joining the bakery three years ago, admits the arrangement took some getting used to. “In most bakeries the head baker decides and the customers buy it or they don’t,” he said. “Here, three hundred people have an opinion about your crumb structure. But they also turn up at five in the morning to help when someone is off sick, so I can’t really complain.”

The numbers behind the loaves

The bakery now employs five people, two full-time and three part-time, all paid above the city’s recommended living wage. It sells around 600 loaves a week, along with pastries and a daily soup at lunchtime. Last year it made a small surplus of just under £4,000, which members voted to spend on a second-hand dough mixer and a bursary to train a young baker from the estate behind the market.

Not everyone thinks the model can be copied easily. A business adviser who works with small shops in the old town said the Common Loaf had benefited from an unusually close-knit street and from founders with time and skills to give. Cooperatives, she said, can struggle when the enthusiasm of the first few years fades.

The members are aware of the risk. At the last annual meeting, they agreed to set aside a portion of any surplus for a reserve fund and to hold an open evening each spring to recruit new members. So far it seems to be working. On the board by the door, under a list of this week’s loaves, a handwritten note announces that membership has just passed 300 – and that the next bread vote closes on Friday.